“... if you want to stick to literature – a hard enough category to circumscribe – you can’t. Plato and Aristotle, whose discussions of mimesis started the ball rolling, were concerned with the way poets imitated reality, rather than their imitation of other authors. That somewhat narrower question emerged from the Roman rhetorical tradition, which is why ...”

“... a puzzle to be solved. In the first novel, the young woman’s scolding of Simón is a parody of Plato, whose theory of forms, unattributed, is the principal topic of the philosophy classes the city lays on. Novilla itself bears some resemblance to the healthy city that Socrates reasons into being in Book 2 of The Republic, prompting Glaucon to jeer at its ...”

“... of television shows, but only through the laying on of hands. We used not to care so much. Plato thought that those who were greatly concerned about what they ate could never be suitable governors of the Republic. You had to eat what you were given and not spare it a second thought. Homer had it right, ...”

“... filmed in 1955) seems weirdly parallel to the hero-worshipping relationship Sal Mineo as Plato has to Dean’s rebel, Jim Stark – except that in the movie Jim is nicer to Plato than Dean was to Hopper, and it’s Mineo’s character who dies. It’s also true that Hopper didn’t start out with any of ...”

“... various sources of information about male homosexuality in historical order; after sections about Plato and Aristotle, she jumps four centuries to Plutarch’s dialogue on love, and then to epigrams in the Greek Anthology, some dating from the Hellenistic age, but others from the Imperial or even the Byzantine period, the novel of Achilles Tatius, and finally ...”

“... rare word, a doubtful tense-form, a logical teaser, an antiquarian practice, a debated passage of Plato or some ‘charmingly obscure’ verses from an archaic poet. A knowledgeable answer wins two prizes – a laurel wreath, and a volume of the Classics. Thus Polite Learning joins hands with Whole-some Mirth. In the background of this edifying picture ...”

“... Léon Brunschvig. That Neo-Kantianism envisaged the history of philosophy as a progression, from Plato through Descartes to Kant in which the truth has gradually emerged, the truth being that what is is what is knowable. The conditions and forms of knowledge determine what is to count as reality: hence Brunschvig’s aphorism that the history of Egypt is ...”

“... and these two blunt instruments are required to do work for which they are quite unfitted. Plato comes out as a softy and Hume a hard man – which does not suggest any deep familiarity with either of those authors. It is implied that the tales give some new insight into the relation between illusion and reality: but this claim is not made good. At ...”

“... Oberman has shown it was pretty typical of the time. His version of Gospel truth owes much to Plato and the early Fathers, seeing reality in the spirit and playing down the flesh as passing shadows. Hardly was Budé told of Erasmus’s sense of outrage before he, too, took offence. Erasmus’s heart must have given a lurch when he saw the address on the ...”

“... institution being taken over and vulgarised by the new rich. In his posthumous treatise Laws, Plato, once the torch-bearer for chastely intellectualised pederasty as the erotic summum bonum, made a ferocious attack on homosexuality, coupled with an insistence, as uncompromising as anything in Leviticus, on sex for procreation only. There is a widespread ...”

“... common to both sides in this debate: that reading Homer, Pindar, the tragic poets, the historians, Plato and Aristotle is an essential part of all Greek education. The debate presupposes that this literature, which few Greeks can now read in the original and many are unwilling to read even in translation, is their literature. Everyone agrees it should be ...”

“... his decision. One key may lie in the nature of Epicurus’ teaching. We are brought up to think of Plato and Aristotle as the fountainheads of two great traditions of philosophical thought; in Coleridge’s words: ‘Every man is born either an Aristotelian or a Platonist ... They are the two classes of men, next to which it is almost impossible to conceive a ...”

“... There is an odd experience that Plato may have had. If light filters into a room through a small enough aperture, anything moving on the street outside will cast its shadow on the ceiling and back wall, and the shadow may have only the most abstract resemblance to the original. Perhaps the human predicament is really like that ...”

“... was in the Comic Spirit. An atheist and a pagan whose mind had been formed by his readings of Plato, Lucian and Lucretius, he found Enthusiasm ‘unpractical’. He defended his moderation and his art by saying ‘we shall nevertheless find in the first place that every successive triumph, however perverted in its immediate consequences, has been a step ...”

“... Theaetetus is flying’: Plato presented the sentence as a paradigm falsehood; good Aristotelians later argued that its falsity was apodictically certain. For the impossibility of human flight seemed to follow ineluctably from two seemingly irrefragable truths. First, there’s no flying without wings. ‘Flight,’ according to Aristotle, ‘is the form of locomotion peculiarly appropriate to birds,’ and it is properly accomplished by means of wings ...”